Journey From Music to Nursing

My interest in music started when I began piano lessons at age 8. In junior high (like middle school) I was chosen to sing in the girls Triple Trio and after that music was my main interest. In high school I was in the top choir, the select madrigal choir, and had solo roles in two school operettas. Music was my whole life and the plan was to study music in college.

After high school my parents, and especially my mother, wanted me to go to college at a church owned junior college in Iowa—Graceland College—where I would meet a nice church boy and get married. But the whole thing didn’t take on me completely. My major, voice and piano, didn’t work out. I didn’t make the cut for the top college choir, the piano lessons were difficult ( I worked the whole year on a blasted Beethoven Sonata and never did learn the thing), and the music theory classes were boring.

In my dorm there were students who had already graduated from a 3 year nursing school. At night we would sit around on the floor in the hall and I would listen to their stories of nursing school. I was mesmerized. When their director of nursing came to our campus to recruit students for the next school term I immediately signed up.

And so I spent the next three years—-the diploma programs were year round—in Independence, MO. The work was interesting and engrossing, we had a great deal of clinical experience, and I took to it eagerly. The school was a strict church-run school and it was very rigid, socially speaking. The instructors were mostly unmarried career nurses who kept a close eye on the all girl school students and we had stiff rules and curfews. When we went on “affiliation” for 9 months to St. Louis and Kansas City for training in the specialties of psychiatric, tuberculosis, and pediatric nursing, many of the girls sewed their wild oats. I was not too involved with the extra curricular activities because I was really committed to learning to be a nurse. Our school had a good reputation and the teachers were excellent so I graduated in three years and had no trouble passing the State Board Exam for licensing.

After graduation I returned to Kalispell and moved back in with my parents. I got a job in the local hospital working for the crabby nuns from the Sisters of Mercy. My stay was terminated when I learned from a local nurse that the government would pay me for going back to college to earn a bachelor’s degree. After 4 quarters at Montana State U.—-yes, they had quarters then, not semesters—I received my BS in nursing. I promptly joined my roommate in hightailing it out of Montana to California where every young Montanan wanted to go.

My roommate was a new teacher and she had signed a contract to teach in Lancaster but I had no job there. I simply went to the hospital and was hired as a med-surg staff nurse. After a short time I was promoted to head nurse of the pediatric ward. The responsibility and the tough schedule interfered with my social life and that’s when I hit upon the idea of going into the military.